By Denise Lavoie, The Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) - The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging a controversial security technique at Logan International Airport that allows police to stop and question people they believe are showing odd or suspicious behavior.
The lawsuit comes three years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks were launched from Logan. Since then, the airport has won numerous accolades for overhauling its security system.
Logan was the first airport in the country to meet a federal mandate to have a completely automated system to screen every piece of luggage. In November 2002, Logan began the nation’s first “behavior pattern recognition” program, in which police stop and question passengers whose behavior seems suspicious.
State police have insisted they do not stop people based on ethnicity or race, but instead focus on their behavior, including loitering without luggage, wearing heavy clothes on a hot day and watching security methods at the airport.
But in a lawsuit filed on behalf of its own national coordinator for racial profiling, who alleges he was harassed by police at Logan last year, the ACLU claims the technique “effectively condones and encourages” racial and ethnic profiling.
“This program is another unfortunate example of the extent to which we are being asked to surrender basic freedoms in the name of security,” said John Reinstein, legal director of the ACLU’s Massachusetts chapter. “This allows the police to stop anyone, any time, for any reason.”
George N. Naccara, the federal security director at Logan under the Transportation Security Administration, said state troopers are trained not to stop people based on race or ethnicity.
“They make it very clear in the training that we’re looking for abnormalities in behavior, and they begin their thought process very carefully,” said Naccara.
“From what I’ve seen, they have very good training. They’re very scrupulous about being fair on this.”
State police, the Massachusetts Port Authority, state police Col. Thomas Robbins and several individual state troopers are named as defendants in the lawsuit, which was filed in Suffolk Superior Court. Robbins, who took the helm of the state police in June, was sent to Logan to be director of aviation security several months after terrorists hijacked two planes from Boston and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
Massport released a statement Wednesday evening saying the behavior pattern program is designed to ensure protection of civil rights, and said racial profiling is not a part of behavior pattern recognition.
State police released a statement late Wednesday saying that state police are “committed to protecting the constitutional civil rights of all citizens.”
The statement said an investigation into the incident has been “complicated by the unwillingness of the ACLU to cooperate,” and that seven state police phone calls and a registered letter to Reinstein had not been answered.
“To date, we have received no response from either Mr. Downing or Mr. Reinstein, but we continue to investigate this incident and look forward to bringing all the facts of the case to light,” the statement said.
Reinstein confirmed that state police had sent the letter and called. But he said the overtures were beside the point, because he had asked for state police documents about the policy, not an internal investigation of the incident.
The civil rights lawsuit was filed on behalf of King Downing, national coordinator of the ACLU’s Campaign Against Racial Profiling, who was approached by police on Oct. 16, 2003, after arriving in Boston to attend a meeting on racial profiling.
Downing, who is black, said he left the gate area and was making a phone call in the terminal when he was stopped by a state trooper who asked him for identification.
When Downing declined to do so without knowing the basis for the request, he was told that he would have to leave the airport, he said in an interview Wednesday. Downing said that when he attempted to leave the terminal, he was stopped again, surrounded by four troopers and told that he was under arrest for failing to produce identification.
Downing, an attorney, said that when he agreed to show his driver’s license, the troopers then demanded to see his airline ticket. After police inspected his identification and travel documents, he was allowed to leave and no charges were ever filed against him, he said.
“I hadn’t done anything wrong and I definitely hadn’t done anything suspicious,” Downing said. “All I was left to suspect was the fact that I was a person of color might have been the motivating factor. I narrowed it down to that being a pretty strong possibility.”
Naccara said behavior pattern recognition techniques are also being used in pilot programs at airports in Portland, Maine, and Providence, R.I.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, asks the court to declare the screening system unconstitutional.